He's one of my very favorites. He came to my studio after we saw him in 03 or 04, I was at a low point of love for visitation, but he came in, I shut my trap, and he sailed through my work on his own, making me feel excited, happy, and self assured. I was completely shocked at how insightful he was. And hilarious. Can't wait for the Guggenheim show, I've got to get to Inglett!

When I think Smith I think totem, fetishization of tools, grimy and agressively polished steel. Buvoli definitely has constructivist roots, but I don't see the primitive totem, surrealist symbolism, thing going on with him. Smith loved animal forms and playing organic off of geometric, but I don't sense an organic presence in Buvoli's work, except in reference to particle flows and cell structure. For Smith, the human figure was a constant reference point, not so much so with Buvoli.

I'm just riffing - I don't have a thesis yet - and dont imagine I am assuming you dont know what I am saying below, if it makes sense then we went to the same sorts of programs, fill me in if I'm missing something.

yes, the david smith I;ve seen is totemic - constellations rather than orbits or futurist motion (marinetti's happy car crash and all the crashed cars and exploding shingle factories referencing futurism like clever A students) - but

Any geometric work, including Judd, implies movement WHEN you repeat forms, (film frames, working serially, placing in a row, intersecting, erasing, subtracting, leaving a blank spot) even if the artist isn't consciously thinking along those lines (time) - which is to say it's subjective, BUT I did see some david smith stuff that implies movement in a tumbling manner more than a zooming thing, and I do know that most sculptors think like cubists in that 180 degrees adds up to a finite 1 or an infinity, any way you want to slice it.

Traditionalists call this way of thinking "in the round" and environmentalists call this "wholistic" or "systemic" thinking

- I know David Hockney was on some TV program gassing on about cubism (the start of systems theory in art?) to a picture of a chair he drew.

and all that - and knowing that Smith was influenced by Giacometti in his early work, one supposes that cubistic geometric abstraction (or any kind of spatial play) is at least of the same genus, if not species.

I guess I'd like to speak more in generalities than any specific signature - it seems more of a universal idea than some kind of individual thing - but that's my axe to grind with the notion of artistic originality and not an attack on this artist in particular - it looks cool, and as anaba mentioned, it takes the sort of bifrost bridge motif and shows a bit more formal thought - less apropriation strategy (which my sculpture teacher taught me is WEAK and more "hand of the artist" - which is a huge battle line, David Smith crossed over somewhat - towards the finish fetishists whos logical extension is the completely machine made - which China is a big machine right? At least in the eyes of the west.

So my narrative arc ends with the idea of mechanization - and the human resistance, and oh, look at the time.

I mean the bronzes (I saqw at the Guggenheim) were totally Giacometti riffs - or whatever Giacometti came out of. The split between that and the later work is like Guston's famous one - just as dramatic IMHO.

But I mean I don't know why it matters. That's what I'm wondering in general. Genre? Generic? Gangrene?

My point...I don't see Futurism, Smith, Giacommetti, totems...obviously I see geometric shapes...but this installation appears to go against gravity...there is a topsy turvy thing going on...in terms of how the lines and shapes...the ins and outs of the negative spaces, enclosed spaces, framed spaces... the way the lines and shapes dangle from the ceiling and jut out from the walls... slice into real space in a way that is different from the stuff you refer to...even in Smith's Cubi series we are still mostly dealing with a central horizontal...squares and rectangles tumble or suggest downward or sideays movement in them...no doubt...and perhaps there is a connection between the suggested movements in certain Smith sculptures and the Buvoli installation...but I would say the that Buvoli disorients the viewer in ways Smith's work does not...there is a precariousness/tenuousness to Buvoli's installation and I always sense a slow low gravity kind of movement in Smith's work...whatever...there ain't no right and wrong...

I'm not sure why the idea of analog between this admittedly Futurist (I looked him up and I was right) artisst, and David Smith the totemic modernist bugs people. Maybe the threat of ego dissolution and entropic decay.

Fututism and modernism both deal with the mechanization of society, so on a conceptual level we can discuss these strategies for adaptation.

On a formal level all I see are vertices, planes and edges, as did Judd, I believe. As well as many scultptors, who can be very clinical when it comes to dissecting form.

I refuse to believe the whimsy of this piece is anything other than a folky skin around the wolf at the door.